Well, since known of the PHP devs have answered, I'm going to state an obvious excellent choice for any language.

Learn Emacs.

That should be a programming commandment.

You hate people don't you?

Actually, I love people which is why I suggested Emacs. You don't need to spend a significant portion of your life learning 18 different little editors for uncommon file formats and languages (where uncommon is not your normal work) because Emacs has a major or minor mode for damn near every file type on earth. Sure, use NetBeans or VS for your daily Java or C# programming, but for a one off assignment, having Emacs in your tool belt is a damn good idea. If you just can't see giving up using a mouse, then grab a copy of XEmacs instead.

at least be sort of human and use vi if you have to do that. gVim is nice. Not going to lie. My 3rd co-op session I had to deal with a bunch of classic ASP pages. I used gVim 6.3 and whipped the shit out of that app.

PHP mode's indentation settings inherit the defaults set by Emacs C mode, or the rules customized for C mode.4

PHP mode provides indentation settings that follow the PHP PEAR “Coding Standards”5. It has the consequence in PHP mode of making the indentation commands use four spaces, and not tabs. This setting is turned on whenever the file name associated with a buffer includes the string “PEAR”, case insensitive and the file ends in “.php”.

CrashTECH wrote:

You are better off... 8 times out of 10 it doesn't format it correctly.

Yeah... and how on earth would you know? Did MS implement a Emacs compatibility mode in VS?!

You do realize that you can get set the spacing in most editors, right?! =)

Actually, I've come across a few editors that seemed to do things in a strange manner. However, a lot of the finger pointing might better be pointed towards the language designer in those cases. For example, you never see any real disagreement on how to format Lisp (and the many derivatives) because the language syntax and grammar is dead simple. Take a fugly language like C++, which is notoriously difficult to parse, then you start to see all kinds of strange finger pointing.

I’m actually trying to get to grips with Eclipse in my spare time, but spare time is rare time at the moment so I haven’t really dug that deep into it all. In this IDE I was used to pressing a single shortcut to move code braces and indents into the correct positioning.

I use free PHP IDE Codelobster PHP Edition.It if fast porable PHP IDE with many usefull features and special plug-ing for the following frameworks:Drupal CMS, Joomla CMS, Smarty, JQuery, CodeIgniter, Symfony, CakePHP and WordPress.

I still use Notepad++ because I'm cheap and the syntax highlighting is good enough for me. Plus, I remember back in the day with Basic and C/C++ in DOS where auto-formatting wasn't really even available in many IDEs.... I remember using the early 1992-93 versions of the Borland Turbo C++ and Turbo Pascal compilers.... you had to do pretty much all formatting and structuring by hand.Heck, I even still use regular Notepad in a pinch. I don't really have an actual IDE of choice that I use, though.

I guess maybe I'm still somewhat old fashioned in the way that I'm used not having auto-formatting text editors and am pretty much content with just a basic text editor and manual structuring/formatting by hand. A bit more work, but it does force you to structure your code and think about what you're doing a bit more., and to keep in mind HOW you're writing your code...

but it does force you to structure your code and think about what you're doing a bit more., and to keep in mind HOW you're writing your code...

I totally disagree with this. Auto-formatting (or lack thereof) has zero effect on code quality in my experience. All auto-formatting and intellisense does is save me time.

Yeah, I don't see how formatting code by hand helps... that time can be spent on rewriting something in a more elegant manner or using a better algorithm. There is always something! =)

It does piss me off when autoformatters delete whitespace though. I think that a line of whitespace can help with code readability/maintainability; It is like a thought bubble in a comic strip or a paragraph in written language. Don't friggin delete my whitespace!

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